External Brain

Google is planning to penalise sites that overuse search-engine-optimisation techniques, according to a report.

Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land has posted an audio clip from a panel discussion at the recent South by Southwest confab, in which Google engineer Matt Cutts discusses the plans.

In search results, Google wants to level the playing field regarding all those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO — versus those making great content and great sites, Schwartz quotes Cutts as saying, in a rough transcription — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Security firm Kaspersky Lab Thursday said it’s identified a malicious program that appears to make use of a compromised Symantec VeriSign digital certificate issued to Conpavi AG, which is known to work with Swiss government agencies. Kaspersky says it has asked Symantec VeriSign to revoke the compromised certificates.

Kaspersky says the malicious program contains what’s being called Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Mediyes. A dropper file is a type of malware commonly used by attackers to seed targeted computers in order to easily drop other malware into it in the future for a wide variety of purposes — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Likely the very first non-email application you ever used to speak with your friends and relatives is about to be shut down for good, AOL Instant Messenger, aka AIM, has been all but slashed entirely from the AOL family. This application’s 40 employees in charge of development as well as everything outside of basic maintenance has been let go entirely. While support staff for the ecosystem will remain, no future upgrades to the software will exist from this point on — via SlashGear

The California city of about 1 million intends to offer high-speed Wi-Fi throughout its downtown, covering an area of 1.5 square miles (3.9 square kilometres) in the middle of this year. But unlike earlier municipal Wi-Fi initiatives, such as a Google-sponsored network that would have covered San Francisco, the San Jose system will be able to pay for itself entirely by helping the government do its job.

In the middle of the past decade, ambitious projects in several cities, including parts of San Jose, promised to blanket outdoor areas with Wi-Fi and provide built-in sources of revenue. Home broadband subscriptions, browser-based advertising or small-business use would help to pay for equipment and operations. But those complicated business models depended on assumptions that often proved unfounded — via redwolf.newsvine.com